Re-Organization Update

Back at the beginning of the year, I made a post about my collecting goals for 2019. I didn't mention anything related to cards like completing a set or purchasing a specific card, it was more along the lines of "hey, here's what I want to accomplish". Specifically, the first entry on the list was about organization ...

Get things organized - Currently my collection is in 3,200 count boxes and I would like to move it to binders. Once we get some Christmas debt paid off here at CCHQ, we are looking to buy another one of those storage cube things for our bedroom. Once we get that, I'm planning on putting binders in that cube as our bookcase is currently full.

Well just last weekend, we bought one. I work in the office of one of the country's largest grocers and one of our perks is 15% off home goods, which a storage cube is part of. We went and bought one and I spent part of a Saturday afternoon putting it together. Once it was together, I realized the binders didn't fit. Oh well, my wife made very good use of it ...

As you can see, she had mad decorating skills. 

I've got three sections and she's got three section. You can probably guess which sections are mine. If you guessed top left, middle left and bottom right, you win.

The top left section has a decidedly Halloween/horror theme to it with my horror movie blu-rays, my Halloween film series box set, and some Funkos from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.  Below that, is the baseball section with two baseball books I dug out of storage, a few more Funkos, and my box of "good stuff" which houses my relics, autos, and early 50s cards that don't fit in a binder currently. The bottom right has more books I dug out of storage and most of the ones I got for Christmas last year.

As for my wife's cubes, she chose to go the Pokemon and Nintendo route with plushes and figurines. You might notice in the back of the middle right cube there are boxes for the NES Classic and SNES Classic. We picked those up a few weeks ago and I'm considering doing a blog post on them. At the bottom, we've got Nintendo themed board games. As you can also see, she used the top of the cube for more decorations and figurines.

Now, what of the binders you ask. Well, since they didn't fit in the cube, I had to improvise.

They actually fit perfectly between the wall and the cube. It's like it was almost supposed to happen that way. Over the past few weekends, I've frantically been bindering up cards like a madman. I've got one giant Indians binder, three giant Reds binders, one and a half hockey binders, and one binder each of wrestling/MMA and miscellaneous cards. Each binder is labeled on the spine of what it is so that I can easily find things. The white binders I got from Costco in a four pack for $12. They're 2-inch binders and fit 50 pages perfectly with a little room to spare.

That's where I'm at so far with my organizing. I'd say I'm off to a pretty successful start. Right now, I'm kind of in pause mode since I'm nearly out of pages and binders. I'd estimate for the cards I have left, I need four more binders and probably three more boxes of pages but I'm in no hurry to complete that right now.

Getting Things Organized

While I was on my blogging hiatus back in the fall and early winter, one of my goals before the baby was born was to finally get my collection organized in a decent manner. The fact that it wasn't organized completely drove me nuts. I tried binders but that got too expensive having to buy pages and the binder itself. Finally, I finally just said "forget this" and I bought five 3200 count boxes to go with one I already had from the card shop. Over the course of two weeks, I emptied the binders organized the cards by team, and started loading them into the boxes. As you can see by the picture above, I filled up all five.

I took a bunch of top loaders I had laying around and used them as dividers. I bought a pack of cheap index cards to use as labels and I cut them to fit in the top loaders. Once I finished sorting everything, I labeled the boxes on the front as to what's in them. I'm pretty pleased with the way I turned out, although I've got one extra 3200 count box and in order to get some extra room, I'm going to split the teams up into American and National League and have two boxes for each league. 

For my Reds cards, I sorted them by decade (80s, 90s, etc.) into their own box for easy sorting and the ability to quickly go through them at a later date to pull out duplicates and cards for my player collections, which might get put into a binder at a later date.

For my non-baseball cards (hockey, football, wrestling, etc.), I managed to get them all into one box with room to spare. The hockey cards are again split up by team, football are split by Bengals and "other", wrestling and UFC cards have their own row, and miscellaneous stuff has some space as well.

Here's my trade box. It's a 1600 count shoebox style box. Again, I used top loaders and index cards for dividers. Although you can't see it, underneath each person's name is a brief summary of what they collect so I can quickly reference it without getting out my master list. The empty space in the box is usually occupied by a Ziploc bag that has cut up binder pages in it that I use for PWEs and a print out of my "trader address book" with everyone's addresses.

That's the majority of my collection organized. There's a few more minor things I have to work on such as sorting and paging up some sets and going through the handful of cards I have in storage in the garage. I'm really happy that I was able to get everything organized mostly and there is a semblance of order with everything..